24Symbols Expands Into Germany, Signs Deal With Mobilcom Debitel

Earlier this month 24Symbolsinked a deal with the third biggest carrier in Germany, Mobilcom Debitel, to offer 24Symbols' subscription ebook service to the mobile operator's customers.

Readers can subscribe and read as many titles from the 100,000 German language titles in 24Symbols' catalog as they like for only 6 euros per month. The ebooks can be read in 24Symbols apps for Android, iPad, and iPhone, and the payment processing is handled by Mobilcom, which will be promoting the service both online and offline campaigns.

24Symbols is one of the older but less buzzworthy subscription ebook services. Primarily based in Spain with English and Spanish titles in its catalog, the deal with Mobilcom marks 24Symbols first major international expansion. Its competitors in Spain include Nubico, Skoobe, and Nuvem de Libros, while in Germany 24Symbols has to contend with Kindle Unlimited, Skoobe again, and Scribd.

Quite some time has passed since 24Symbols last crossed my desk, and i was frankly surprised to learn that it had added 100,000 German language titles to its catalog. That is a better selection than Skoobe boasts, and it could be more German language titles than Kindle Unlimited (it's difficult to say from across the ocean).

Nate Hoffelder

Nate Hoffelder is the founder and editor of The Digital Reader. He has been blogging about indie authors since 2010 while learning new tech skills weekly. He fixes author sites, and shares what he learns on The Digital Reader's blog. In his spare time, he fosters dogs for A Forever Home, a local rescue group.

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5 Comments

If you go to amazon.de – Kindle unlimited and substract the foreign books (Fremdsprachige Bücher) from the total amount of books found you get 59798 German ebooks for Kindle unlimited Germany.
Though this doesn’t say anything about the qualitiy of the books. I guess you can’t just compare numbers here.

Amazon.de lists a bit over 950,000 books for Unlimited in Germany. 890,000 of those are in the Foreign Language section, however, so 60K German-language books.

I can’t say for sure how much most Germans care for all the foreign-language books, but the last Harry Potter shifted a healthy 400K copies in English on the day of release (the German translation came out months later), so interest in English-language books at least is non-zero.